When I was young, I worked as an editor in one of the night teams at Expressen. Part of the job was to draw in the column of the cello ear Cello. His real name was Olle Carle and his kåseri collections were mandatory Christmas presents in countless Swedish homes. Each kåseri was a virtuoso number, verbal acrobatic art. Every sentence a pun.
By all accounts, Cello wrote his modest columns in format under tremendous effort, sat hour after hour at the typewriter and left the script pages, the “menus”, only well into the night.
Nowadays I have come to the conviction that the main criterion for a professional writer is that he or she writes under internal resistance, is tormented, prefers to avoid and snorts at amateurs who pour out about how “fun” it is to write. Writing is not fun. It’s like swimming in icy sea water. It’s just enjoyable afterwards.
Then, of course, there are exception writers who confirm the rule. Alf Henrikson seems to have been one such. In fact, he seems to have found, in the best sense, childish pleasure in the writing itself. It went fast. It went easily. It became a lot.
A telling example of this, shall we say, Mozart-like and happy relationship to professional text production is conveyed in “The Road through H”, an in the spirit of the object both entertaining and educational “book about Alf Henrikson”. The well-chosen title is an allusion to the classic “The Road through A” which the publishers, the Alf Henrikson Society, borrowed from the SvD profile Kajenn.
In October 1992, the school director in Huskvarna contacted Alf Henrikson. Could the popular and educating author, born and raised in Huskvarna, think of figuring out some tips and poles for a local historical spectacle? Alf Henrikson had turned 87 during the summer. He pointed out that he was no longer a youth, but would still think about it a bit. Some tips. Some posts.
Just a few months later, in January, he delivered. However, not the cautiously requested, but a whole package, the feature and clear:
“No poles, but a finished script: Huskvarna’s story depicted in 33 tableaux on forty – rhyming knit verse, including stage directions, inlaid songs and suggestions for how the music should be performed.”
The premiere takes place in the summer 1994. Alf Henrikson had then traveled back and forth between Stockholm and Huskvarna to participate in the rehearsal work. At the same time, he made regular visits to the thoracic clinic at Karolinska Hospital. The lungs were bad there, severely tested by the carefree flare of a long journalistic life.
Aged. Ill. But still Alf Henrikson could not help but write. He died quietly on May 9, 1995, two months before he would have turned 90 years old. On the same day, Dagens Nyheter’s readers could read a newly written daily verse on the Namn & Nytt page, Henrikson’s home for 65 years, for the morning coffee. The poem was a tribute to the good craftsman, a kind of discreet self-conscious self-portrait one might say: “Amateurs and beggars abound; we all belong there most of the time. / Praise be to those who have knowledge of the grips, / the master grips of the human fingers. ”
You should probably still be careful to conclude from Alf Henrikson’s satisfied diligence that his verses and books wrote themselves. It does not always have to be easy as pie. But he seems to have been one of the lucky ones who finds joy in the difficult, one of the enviable who stares down at a dead engine and rubs his hands in delight at soon having them soiled with oil. He liked the craft job. It is emphasized time and time again in “The Road through H”. Alf Henrikson not only carved verses but also with delight various board constructions. In answer to the question why he insisted on remaining an employed verse writer for a daily newspaper year after year, he replied: “I enjoyed the job.”
He was 24 years old when one summer day in 1929 he stumbled into Dagens Nyheter’s editorial office in the hope of selling a kåseri and was met by the editor-in-chief Sten Dehlgren who asked the somewhat surprising question: Well, are you coming now?
Hard to deny the fact. He was there. But it sounded like he was waiting. Artificial. Alf Henrikson had traveled to Stockholm to become a Hallåman at Radiotjänst, but was knocked out at the microphone test. To DN he had engaged in speculation, uninvited. It then turned out that Dehlgren had sent a letter that had gone astray. During a long stay in Germany, Henrikson had sold travel series to DN and now Dagens Nyheter had by correspondence offered him a summer temporary position.
It became “yes thank you” and Alf Henrikson was placed on the Name & News editorial board. There he stayed and stayed and stayed and stayed and stayed. In total, it is said, there were around 20,000 daily verses. That means, if I have divided correctly, one poem a day seven days a week for like 55 years. Added reports and translations. And in addition to the newspaper work more than 100 books, several own operas, revues and plays, a dozen translations of opera librettos (among them “The Magic Flute” in Ingmar Bergman’s vintage), song and hit lyrics such as Hugo Alfvén’s “Roslagsvår” (“Johansson, touch the pops … ”) And“ Elsewhere waltz ”, the winner of the 1965 Swedish Melodifestival. To this must be added recurring participation in radio and television. The love of the people was matched by its desire to buy. Folk educator and storyteller Henrikson could claim bestseller status. His “Stories of Antiquity” sold a quarter of a million copies. “Swedish history” went even better with a total edition of 360,000 copies. He was also rewarded in other ways: became an honorary doctor at Stockholm University in 1968, was named professor by the government in 1987.
A brilliant life path. And all the time he insists that he is a journalist, also in the books, also when he writes his daily verses. Coquetry? False modesty? Coffee for objections? Maybe a bit. The need for confirmation is one of journalism’s most powerful driving forces. But when Henrikson stubbornly claims that he is a journalist everywhere and always, it is also a manifestation of the craftsman’s self-awareness and pride.
That is why it is absolutely right that there are two extremely professional DN profiles who are responsible for the rich and fun book about the poetic journalist: the reporter and author Åke Lundqvist and the language writer Catharina Grünbaum. “The Road through H” begins in the biographical. Lundqvist is responsible for a more than 150-page biography. Then follows a more encyclopedic part where a number of different aspects of Alf Henrikson’s life and work are highlighted; literary loans and inspirers, the translations, the love of antiquity, the artists he constantly collaborated with (Birger Lundquist, Björn Berg and others). Grünbaum is responsible for most of these pedagogical essays. But there are also contributions from, among others, the late literary scholar Christer Åsberg, who was also responsible for important parts of the basic research on Henrikson.
It’s great reading. Repetitions occur repeatedly. But as Alf Henrikson himself knew better than most: A good anecdote can be repeated. The same goes for a useful rhyme (“this” seems to have been a favorite…). What strikes one besides craftsmanship, the superb touch with verse size and sentence structure, is the playfulness. Here is an obvious joy in the play with words and letters that I think the tormented Cello may also have felt in happier moments. As a child, Alf Henrikson was able to revel in rhymes and sounds and, like his colleagues in the word play union Povel Ramel and HasseåTage, turn foolishness into irresistibility. Goethe gets to eat breakfast at Henrikson’s in the forest and “over all the croissants there is peace”.
And speaking of Goethe – his pair of horses Friedrich Schiller stated that man only plays when he is fully human and she is fully human only when she plays. Play as the true manifestation of humanism.
You want to imagine that it is true. Journalism is intimately linked to humanistic values, with the aim of creating and safeguarding a democratic, free and solidary society. Therefore, it is only natural that dictators abhor the free press. It is equally natural that the playful Henrikson, in spite of a disinterested interest in “politics” in the book about him, in his verses exquisitely ironically distanced himself from derogatory and stupefying ways of thinking and ideologies, especially among them Nazism.
And it is also natural that newspaper editors, when they work best, can be wonderful playgrounds.
Åke Lundqvist shuts down great care in drawing Alf Henrikson’s growing up environment: the mill Huskvarna, dominated by the weapons factory. It was an industrial environment characterized by craft pride. Henrikson’s relationship with it was certainly not without problems. The grandfather, the blacksmith trusted in association life, was sentenced to prison for embezzlement. The father, who was allowed to read on to the real, nevertheless came to stay at the factory, as a worker. Alf Henrikson himself took the student on a classical course at Jönköping’s educational institution, but was never at any university. Instead, he read the university courses in Latin on his own. It was an economic issue.
But still: Huskvarna was the city of craftsmen and games and he carried Huskvarna with him into DN’s editorial office, into the authorship.
One of the finest of the many verses quoted in “The Road through H” is about how Alf Henrikson paints a self-built outbuilding at the summer place on Ljusterö with Falu red. It is also, I would say, about the joy of writing in newspapers.
“Oh, Rembrandt was never so great in creation, / never was Giotto so great and Goya so powerful. / For we did not create like these a painting on canvas / but we colored reality itself. ”